Monthly Archives: April 2010

Posted inEmotional Growth • marriage

How to Say “I Love You”

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I learned a lot watching my family at the airport. I learned something new about my husband. He’s a “good helper,” just like my daughter. The woman ahead of him in the bag check line had trouble getting her suitcase handle to retract. I realized this when I saw my husband on the ground, pounding that handle back into her suitcase. Oh boy, I thought. He’s probably so pissed off that this woman’s holding him up. And then his head bobbed up so I could see. He was smiling. Smiling! “Got it!” he said.

Who is this guy? I wondered. My husband, the one I see at home, would be all pissed off. My husband, the guy who tells me how somebody at work screwed up the entire accounting system and so he has to work tonight, doesn’t take kindly to strangers making him wait. My husband, who threatened to sue United Airlines last week for not seating him with his two and a half-year-old daughter, does not volunteer help like a modern-day Lone Ranger.

I thought and thought about it and now I wonder: When he goes off by himself – business trips, work and whatnot – is he a whole different person? Is he patient and positive and helpful? And if he is, where does it come from? He’s never like that at home. Worse, is that his normal persona? Now that I think about it, when we first met, he was a pretty positive guy. I didn’t see him mad for at least a year. And now he gets mad all the time. My God, did we beat him with an angry stick?

All this time I’ve blamed him for his moods, his anger, his negativity. And now I see it could all be my fault. I married him. I wanted a house. He had to get a better job to pay for it. We both wanted a child but I’m not sure he realized what he’d signed up for. Rose is really well-behaved but he doesn’t handle her breaking rules very well. His promotion was what brought us to Seattle, but I was the one who liked to move and he knew that. Relocation took us away from our house by the bay, our friends and his family. All because he wanted a better life for us, his family. And now he works all the time. He’s in the office from nine to five, but he works nights, weekends, and answers never-ending emails on his Blackberry at all hours. We’re on “vacation” but he won’t stop working. Work never stops. Never.

And that’s why I figured his temper flared so much. How could anyone who never gets a break from work deal with home, or Rose, or the airport? But now I see that work may not be the root of this evil. Work is still there when he helps a stranger with her luggage. He’s still on call when he sweet-talks security into letting us bring the carseat on the plane. The thing that’s different is that he’s not at home. That must be it. World Matt is a whole different guy.

I like World Matt. I wish I could bring him home. But what can we do? Rose is going to act up. Domestic duties don’t disappear. I’ll still be his wife.

Or will I? If Rose and I make him unhappy, we can’t keep doing it in good conscience. We love him, after all. We want him to be happy. But he says he loves us. If he loves us, but he’s unhappy when he’s with us, how can that continue?

I read an article once called “How Your Toddler Says ‘I Love You.’” The “I Love You” that I remember most vividly is: “He’ll save his worst behavior for you.” Maybe that applies to husbands too. I mean, when you boil it right down, men are just tall kids. Maybe that’s how Matt shows how much he loves us. I’d really appreciate seeing his best behavior more often than his worst, but let’s face it, we save our worst behavior for him too. I don’t censor my moods for him. Hell, I don’t even sensor my words. Rose doesn’t sit still at dinner or listen when he directs her. What do we expect?

Maybe we’ve all gotten too comfortable with each other. Maybe we need to treat each other like potential friends rather than family. Maybe if we kept the fact that we like each other at the front of our minds instead of the back, we would treat each other with more consideration and kindness. Maybe we can. But if we did that, who would see our worst faces? Who would know us as we know each other? Hopefully not our bosses or our teachers. Hopefully not random strangers. Maybe our friends, but if all they got was our worst, they wouldn’t stick around long. I guess our family is the only safe place for that stuff. We know they’ll stick with us, no matter which side of us they see.

If there’s a solution to this problem, it must lie somewhere in the middle. I’d like to see more of World Matt at home. He’d like to see more of World Maria, I bet. So if we could keep World Matt and World Maria in mind when we’re tempted to unleash the beast within us, we’d see more of our best, rather than our worst. Maybe our best selves would win over our worst selves in this emotional cage match. And maybe that beast would become the exception, rather than the rule. I can’t guarantee it but it’s worth a shot. Anybody want to place a bet?

Posted inEmotional Growth

Your Money or Your Life?

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“My friend said I should get a laptop. He does a lot of work on his computer.”

“Well, you told me you didn’t like to use the computer in that room because it’s cold. If you had a laptop, you could use it anywhere in the house.”

“Well, yeah, it’s cold. I turn the heater on in that room, but by the time it heats up, it’s time for bed. I could put the heat on up there, but who wants to heat all those rooms when I just need to use one?”

That’s my dad. He’s not poor anymore. Not since he was a kid. Just cheap. His whole life is about money. In the same phone call, he told me he was not going to travel to Argentina because he couldn’t find a hotel room for under $200 a night. He could easily afford that price, but he doesn’t want to spend the money. He’s 81 and he could spend money enjoying his last years, but he’d rather spend his last years trying to hold onto his money.

I have paid dearly for his frugality. His computer sits in my old bedroom and he’s not kidding: it’s cold. The room is on the outside corner of the house, above the garage, so cold air envelops it. When I got home from school in the winter, I’d have to crawl under the covers to stay warm until dinner. When I was younger, I’d go into my parents’ bedroom and turn up the heat, but when my father got home, he’d yell at me for wasting his money. I got tired of the daily tirade, so I just spent my afternoons in bed.

When I was in grade school, we had “the blue car.” It was a Chevy Malibu my father bought when he married my mother, or shortly before that. After many icy, salty New York winters, the driver’s side floorboards rotted through, so there was a hole under the pedals. The car still ran, so my father patched the floorboards with an old snow shovel. He drove it that way for years. On cold days, we could feel a draft coming up from the driver’s feet. In the summer, it was kind of a reverse convertible.

My mother was the total fiscal opposite of my father. She lived to spend money. I think it was her revenge for my father’s despised frugality. She taught piano to local kids after school, so her days were free and she spent them shopping. When I was young, we spent days and days in furniture stores, for years, it felt like, looking for the right end table. As I got older, I’d get home from school and find an A&S bag on my bed with four sweaters in it, in a couple of different sizes, different styles, to try. My mother would return the ones I didn’t want. There was no limit to her spending. Passion for fashion was the only thing we really had in common, so that was our mother-daughter bonding time. In junior high I authored an outfit chart, organizing my wardrobe so that I could avoid repeating outfits during the school year.

And now I worry that Matt and I have stepped into my parents’ fiscal roles. We’re different – Matt’s not cheap and I don’t do any vengeful spending, but Matt does make the bulk of the money and I do most of the shopping. For the past three years, we’ve focused on paying off debt. For the first 2 ½ years, we focused solely on the credit card. Just days after we got it to zero, I found a vacation deal we couldn’t resist. A week in Hawaii, a few days at sea, drops us off two hours from home and the deal clincher – free babysitting! All it took was a few grand on the credit card. So now we’re back on the hamster wheel of debt. And when we focus on curing debt, we don’t spend money on the things we want until the debt is paid.

It’s not the debt or even the refusal to spend money that worries me. It’s the obsessive focus on funds that carries me back to frugal hell. Ninety percent of my father’s conversation revolves around money. Always has. If he’s not specifically discussing money, some part of the dialogue will take a fiscal turn. For example, he might say something like, “Mrs. Brown died last week. I saw it in the paper. The service was today at the funeral home in Mahopac. She was a nice lady. She had a Maltese she used to walk around the neighborhood. I was going to go but why would I? I don’t know her family. I didn’t send any flowers because why should I spend $50 for three carnations to sit on top of a grave?”

Matt and I don’t talk like that but I have caught myself throwing financial statements into non-financial conversations and it scares me. I also tend toward deprivation if I feel money’s tight. I won’t buy that bottle of water no matter how dire the thirst. I have free water at home. I’ll go without eggs and coffee until I feel flush again. I’ll make myself crazy crossing off un-bought groceries from my list because I’m afraid I’ll spend too much and be left with nothing. I get obsessed and I can’t stop until I have money again.

Matt doesn’t freak out on spending. He freaks out on budgeting. He’s a mathematician by nature and an accountant by profession, so he can boil everything down to dollars and cents. Once or twice a month, he sends me a spreadsheet detailing our finances. If we’re considering a purchase or a fiscal change, spreadsheet frequency increases to once or twice a week, sometimes once a day. Matt can discuss money and fall asleep within minutes. We had to have a talk about that because he’d get me all riled up about finances before bed and then I’d be up for hours, all those new numbers swirling in my head.

I hate spending so much of our lives focused on money. I swore I’d never be like my father. His obsession with money permeated every conversation, every lifestyle decision, and every minute of my young life. I don’t ever want to live like that again.

Because I’m so afraid of living like that, I tend toward paranoia when I assess my own behavior. I just posted about half price Easter candy on Facebook – am I becoming my father? But the truth is, we don’t live like my father. The truth is that we could have foregone the Hawaiian vacation, as my father chose to forego his trip to Argentina. We could have chosen a zero balance over a new adventure and a lifetime of memories, but we chose the trip. In other words, we chose a life well-lived over our bank account.

My father expends all of his energy trying to hold onto his money. Even now, he’s depriving himself of the pleasures of life just to maintain his bottom line. I may never be able to shake the habit of injecting money into conversation, and Matt will never stop analyzing figures, but our priorities are in the right place. I’m sure that at the end of our lives, if we face a choice of a trip around the world or a healthy inheritance for the kids, we’ll choose to pack our bags. And we’ll have taught the kids a lesson far more valuable than any inheritance. Our kids will still learn that money is important – we need it to survive – but it’s far more important to spend money on life than it is to spend life on money.

Posted inEmotional Growth

The Gift of Morning Sickness

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Maybe my father’s right. Maybe I don’t appreciate anything. Since I never fulfilled his dream of landing a secure job in the insurance industry, I didn’t fully appreciate the college education he funded. He says I never appreciated anything he did for me. It’s got to be true. If I had already mastered appreciation, there would be no way to justify what I’ve been through these last few months.

I thought I was a pretty appreicative person. For more than 10 years, I’ve shared a gratitude list with a group of women five days a week. I stop and smell the roses. I say “thank you” a lot. So up until a few months ago, I thought I was leading a pretty grateful life. Then I got pregnant. I was more than grateful for that. We’d given up on pregnancy and decided to adopt a second child. I’d been researching adoption for two months, thinking God, it would be so much easier if I could just get pregnant and Boom! Two lines on the pee stick.

So yaay, we would have a second child. Cool. About a week after I took the test, a close friend confided that she’d just suffered a miscarriage, nine weeks into her pregnancy. She didn’t know until she saw her ultrasound. I reassured her and she eventually recovered, but I could not stop thinking: I could lose this baby. I’m 41, the risks escalate as women age. Oh, God, I hope I don’t have a miscarriage!

A couple of weeks later, the morning sickness started. Every day, all day, all night, I felt like puking. I did not puke. Puking offers about an hour of relief. No such break for this mama. With the nausea came overwhelming headaches. I would also awaken in the middle of the night for an hour or two, unable to fall back to sleep. It was natural insomnia but my current worries about miscarriage and a million other things didn’t help alleviate it.

Last year while we were actively trying to get pregnant, I thought about the truly horrible morning sickness I’d suffered with Rose. (See “Pregnancy: It’s Not Pretty” for a full description.) I maintained that I’d go through it all again if it meant we could have another girl. Yes, it’s a wives’ tale that girls make you sick, but it’d proven itself with Rose so I was willing to believe.

Eight weeks into the pregnancy, I had some spotting and freaked out. I’d never spotted with Rose and I was so obsessed with miscarrying that I thought this was it. Bye-bye baby. The doctor ordered an ultrasound and the baby was fine, and I was not eight, but nine weeks pregnant. Woohoo! My doctor reassured me that it’s very rare to miscarry after nine weeks. In fact, she said, it usually happens at four or five weeks, but unless they bleed, women don’t find out until nine weeks, when they have their first ultrasound.

Nine weeks along also meant I had only five more weeks of morning sickness to go. With Rose, it stopped at 14 weeks. They say the first pregnancy’s a good predictor of the second for things like that.

Well, Week 14 came and went, and the sickness raged on. I couldn’t take it anymore. For 10 weeks so far, I’d struggled to function every day. Back at 12 weeks I’d begun to cry every day, just asking for relief from the sickness. One night during Week 14, I fell to my knees in the dark, sobbing for an hour, begging God to take the morning sickness away. I’d still take good care of the baby, I promised. Just please, please, make it stop! I can’t take it anymore! I cried myself to sleep. The next morning, I thought about all the prayers He hears from people who really suffer — prayers for adequate food and clean water, prayers for safety in war-torn countries, prayers pleading for relief from daily abuse. I felt guilty. Here I was, a financially secure woman with a loving husband and daughter and a healthy pregnancy and I wanted relief from something as trivial as morning sickness. How many of those people would willingly suffer sickness for two and a half months if they had what I had? Why did I think I was entitled to feel better?

At about Week 15, the morning sickness began to subside. At first, I had four hours of nausea-free bliss, then it came back. Oh well, I thought, with Rose it went away 30 percent and then for good. The next day I was sick all day. Soon after, I had a nausea-free day but the following day it came back. This went on for about 10 days. Then I had three sickness-free days in a row. Wow, I thought. This is it. It’s gone!! The next day it was back. But as it improved, I learned real gratitude. I learned to appreciate the hell out of every moment I didn’t feel sick. I took advantage when I felt well and wrote or cooked or gardened until I felt sick again.

I realized that morning sickness had robbed me of something that was not as crucial as basic needs or safety but was indeed important: my freedom. Every day I was sick, I had to take an afternoon nap just to feel well enough to make it through the evening. Before that, those two hours during Rose’s nap used to be my “mom time” – the time I used to write or read or do something that was a “want to” not a “have to.” I used to look forward to those hours. I would never squander them doing anything I could do when Rose was awake. I would plan them, so that I could utilize every single minute. And suddenly my two daily hours of freedom were gone. For three months, everything I did was a “have to.” I enjoyed nothing. Even the fun moments with Rose and Matt were diminished because I was too sick to feel happy. That’s what took such a toll on me. Imagine going three months without cracking a smile.

So when I started to feel better, I realized that I had learned a lot about gratitude and more about living in the moment. Sometimes a few moments of wellness were all I had, so I had to make each one count. And I did.

I believe that when the student is ready, the teacher comes. Experience is the biggest teacher of all. I thought I knew how to appreciate the present but I tend to worry about a lot of things that never happen. I tend to construct disaster scenarios in my head. I guess I needed a lesson in staying present. I don’t think it needed to be quite so harsh, but at least I can count it as the one reward for enduring 3 months of morning sickness. I’ll begin to appreciate the other reward when he or she is born.

Posted inmarriage

Marriage and the Scientific Method

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I remember in sixth grade, our scientific focus turned away from absorbing information and toward testing ideas. That’s when we learned the Scientific Method. According to my research, the semantics of the Method have changed over the years but in sixth grade, its first step was “Define the Problem.” Now it’s “Make an Observation,” followed by “Ask a Question,” which, if you ask me, is the same thing as “Define the Problem.” I guess they had to dumb it down because some children got left behind.

Through making observations and asking questions (thus defining problems), I’ve learned that the Scientific Method applies not only to discovering the best way to grow mold but also to romantic relationships. That’s right, relationships. We (well, women anyway) hear and read so much relationship analysis that characterizes so many of our differences as unknowable, we begin to think fights happen because “men are impossible” or “women are so hormonal.” And truthfully, some fights do stem from the differences between the sexes. Some really are irresolvable. But what I’ve realized, using the Scientific Method, is that some fights have nothing to do with our behavior or our hormonal state. With the right solutions, some fights just go away.

The key is to define the right problem. My husband, Matt, and I used to fight at least twice a week because we didn’t have clean forks. Dishes were Matt’s job and if he hadn’t done them, I’d look in the drawer for a fork to say, beat some eggs, and the only thing in the fork slot would be crumbs. Blood would flood my face, my head felt as if it would explode and I’d yell, “WE’RE OUT OF FORKS SO I CAN’T COOK! HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO COOK WITHOUT FORKS?” And then Matt would say, “I was gonna do the dishes tonight.” And I would say, “Well we need dishes NOW!” and we would argue until he did the dishes or I resentfully washed one fork and wouldn’t talk to him for the rest of the day.

When we first moved to Seattle, we were at Wal-Mart shopping for the new apartment when we stumbled upon the flatware displays. Matt said, “Do you want to get a new set now?” For ages, we’d said that we would buy an additional set of silverware but the opportunity never presented itself. Now here we were. So we bought a new set. We brought it home and no matter how long Matt dragged his ass on doing dishes, we never ran out of forks again. Boom. No more fight.

So let’s define the problem. I thought it was, “Matt drags his ass on doing dishes so I never have the right tools to cook.” Matt thought it was “Maria would rather bitch than wash a freakin’ fork.” The problem really was: We don’t have enough forks. It’s not like we didn’t know that. Like I said, we’d been intending to buy more silverware for a long time. It’s just that we got so mired in our own definitions that it never occurred to us that if we instituted this one little fix, we’d solve the whole problem. Instead I thought Matt needed to stay on top of the dishes and he thought I should just shut up and wash what I needed. Both of us were too stubborn to cave, so if we hadn’t supplemented our silverware, we’d still be having that fight.

Here’s another problem we couldn’t correctly define. Since the start of this pregnancy, I’ve been sleeping poorly. The kid wakes me up between 3 and 5 a.m. Between the natural pregnancy insomnia and Matt snoring I can’t get back to sleep. Once I slept so poorly I couldn’t function the next day so I asked Matt to work at home and watch Rose so I could go back to bed. Anytime I interfere with his work, he gets really mad. He stayed home that day but he insisted I call the doctor and see what she could do about the insomnia. I knew there was nothing she could do because insomnia’s a normal symptom of pregnancy and you can’t take aspirin, for God’s sake. It’s not like you can take sleeping pills. But he continued to rant that day that he wasn’t sleeping well either because the woman who was carrying his second child was getting up too many times during the night to pee.

It’s not like sleeping was a sea of bliss for us in the first place. I go to bed before Matt because I can’t fall asleep while he’s next to me. He dozes; he jerks, he dozes; he jerks. Then when he falls asleep, he snores. For the record, I snore too, but he can sleep through mine, whereas I cannot sleep through his. So additional sleep issues just stirred the pot. Plus, losing sleep makes us irritable, so that exacerbated the marital unrest.

I was telling my best friend about the sleep issues and she said, “Just get a new bed! You’ve been talking about getting a king-sized bed forever anyway. What’s $3,000 compared to saving your marriage?” The marriage was never in trouble, but who knows what would have transpired had we kept losing sleep and fighting about it? Plus, she’s never steered me wrong so I said, “You’re right. We should buy a new bed as soon as possible.”

We raided our savings and got a really good deal on a bed at our buying club, so with a good chunk of cash and some wee-hour Benadryl we solved our sleep problem. We got a foam bed, so I don’t feel Matt jerk when he dozes anymore, and he doesn’t awaken when I get up to pee because he can’t feel me move either. We still snore, but I wear earplugs when he’s snoring now.

So the problem was not, “Matt is impossible to sleep next to and now he’s even more of a pain in the ass,” like I thought it was. And it was not, “I never should have knocked up my wife because the bitch wakes me up five times a night now,” as I imagine he thought. It was: We have inadequate sleeping accoutrements.

Although each problem ultimately involved making a purchase, I want to emphasize that retail therapy is not the answer to all marital problems. And even the Scientific Method, in all of its glory, doesn’t fix everything. But for some fights, especially the ones we believe would be resolved if our partner could just CHANGE, maybe we’re focusing on finding fault where we really should be finding a solution. If we focus on the problem itself and not our partner’s role in it, maybe we can see clear to a simple fix that will make us wonder why we didn’t just do that in the first place.